Please, for the love of god, look at other things instead of Ansible.

Definitely do openTofu for infrastructure and deployment, but for configuration of VMs please learn about puppet, saltstack, chef(cinc.sh) and especially mgmtConfig .

Ansible, by comparison, better matches what we were doing in 2002 at 1/10th the speed, and it’s like pascal levels of wordy.

Learning about options and finding one that works well for you will often give you a much better experience than fucking Ansible.

If you do abandon all hope, though, then go ahead and do Ansible; but remember if you do: there are better options, and hating Ansible doesn’t mean you hate automation.